Easy riding; it's flat most of the day. Eat a very large watermelon in one sitting, to the astonishment of the woman who sold it to me. Can't find anywhere to camp; it gets dark - a monk lets me camp in the garden of his wat (temple).

BIG descent down towards the Mekong valley. Camped out on the lakeshore - the lake is full of fishermen puttering about in their long-tailed boats, checking their nets. A nice warm swim. The bucket shower in Phoukhoun was very c-c-c-cold.

Misty morning, sunny afternoon, but it's not hot. This road is supposed to be a bit dangerous, so I rode fast. Went past Phoukhoun and tried to camp but was arrested, in the friendliest possible way, by three plain-clothes soldiers with AK47 machine guns and powerful motorbikes. Sent back to Phoukhoun to overnight in a guest house.

Got into Laos at last. Third time lucky. The roads are good, but they have a nasty habit of climbing every hill in sight. Nothing but tiny villages until Sam Neua, where there is a bank, market and a few guesthouses. But I am in a hurry so I press on, and camp by the side of the road in the jungle.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Takes all day to bus, walk, hitch and motorbike-taxi it up to the border post at Nameo. By the time I arrive, it has closed for the day. My bike is still there, though, being looked after by the customs officer in his hut.

I spend the night in a guesthouse at the border, where a large mouse (or possibly a small rat) drops from the ceiling and lands six inches from my head. I scream like a girl.

This time, the story is: Yes, foreigners can cross the border at Na Meo. But No, a Lao visa is not available at the border. The Vietnamese border guards were very apologetic (not that it is their fault), and are looking after my bike for me while I make a trip to Hanoi to get a Lao visa from the consulate there. They even gave me an informal 4-day visa extension, since my Vietnam visa expires tomorrow.

'Informal' means that they will let me out, but it doesn't mean that anyone else will recognise it. Which leaves me with a problem, because I can't stay in a hotel once my visa has expired (you have to show your visa at check-in). And my tent is in Na Meo, at the border with my bike. And it is quite chilly at night now. So I may have to buy a bottle of cider in a brown paper bag and sit by the lake all night.

Note to travellers: on Vietnamese buses (I took two in my visa-hunting zip from Na Meo to Hanoi), try not to sit next to women. They all, almost without exception, vomit continuously throughout the journey, into little plastic bags which they toss out of the window when full. For some reason men don't seem to be affected.

Another attempt at getting into Laos. I am about 45 km short of the Na Meo border. It got dark on me half way up the valley. A local shopkeeper kindly invited me to sleep and eat in his house in this village. It is a Thai-style house-on-stilts with a thatched roof and rattan-and-tarpaulin walls. He gave me a pool table to sleep on. Surprisingly comfortable.

I crashed twice today. I have never crashed before. Both times the immediate cause was a silly cow in the road, and the slightly less immediate cause was a silly bugger on my bike. Or perhaps it should be the other way around.

Anyway, after yesterday's brakeless near-end, today I had new brakes in. I suppose I was used to having to squeeze the old brakes hard to get any stopping power. Now a light touch is enough. A hard squeeze locked up the rear wheel, and on both occasions it slid, once in mud, once in a cowpat.

Afterwards, I swore at the cows. They looked blankly at me, and said moo. This made me quite angry.

1. The road from Moc Chau to the Vietnam-Laos border (signposted to 'Cua Khao') is 32 km long, almost all uphill, and very hard work. At the top, a very polite Vietnamese border official will inform you that this border is no longer open to foreigners, and you will have to go back down again. So I am not in Laos.

2. From Moc Chau east towards Mai Chau, the road climbs for about 25 km, and then descends steeply and longly on a winding mountain road. There was near-whiteout fog and drizzle. My brakes failed. (My fault, I did not maintain them properly.) The pull of gravity down the slope outweighed any remaining friction in my brakes, and I lost control. The bike was going faster and faster, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I hit 52 km/h, my computer tells me later. One overtaking car, broken down truck, vehicle out of position, motorbike coming round a bend, landslip, roadworks, cow, old woman... anything would probably have killed me, and quite possibly them too if it was something animate that I hit. All of these things are extremely common on this road. I must have been going 3 or 4 kilometres in this condition, screaming all the way hoping that people would get out of the way.

I had both brake levers pulled right down to the handlebars, and I was still accelerating. I tried using my feet as friction brakes, scuffing the soles of my sandals on the road, but they kept catching on the road surface and being pulled backwards (nearly breaking my legs in the process).

Eventually, when the road flattened slightly, I was able to get onto the crossbar of the bike and 'run' along astride the bike, gradually taking more strain on the legs and pulling the bike up with my arms.

I stopped. But I was very, very lucky. My chances were probably worse than 50-50, given the frequency of broken-down trucks on the road (but none, by a miracle, on my runaway stretch). In retrospect I should probably have baled out and taken the cuts, bruises and breaks; they would have been less life-threatening. My bike would probably have gone over the cliff though.

Afterwards, as I stood shaking by the roadside, unhurt apart from some bruising on my thighs from stopping the bike, a man past whom I had hurtled a minute or two previously, yelling like a lunatic, came down to check that I was all right, and shook my hand. He stayed to help me adjust my brakes, too. People can be very, very kind.

Message to any other cyclists as foolish as me: do not let your brakes get to the point where they are at full-stretch to stop you in the dry. When it rains, you will not stop.

Look at that downhill between Son La and Moc Chau. I don't think I've ever hit 60 k/h on a laden bike before.

This road must have been designed by M.C. Escher. It follows a river, upriver, for about 20 km and yet the road is consistently downhill, without ever changing much its height above the river level.

The reverse scenario, in which uphill roads follow rivers downstream, is well known and understood by cyclists, if not physicists, but I believe this example, of the magic working in the cyclist's favour, to be unique.

An easy day, I think the double rest day helped... Planned to stay in Tuan Giao, but the only hotel was a little expensive and not very nice, so, since it was early, I bought an ice cream and headed on up what was supposed to be tomorrow's pass instead.

An 800 metre climb, but if you've got to climb, there is no nicer time to do it (no nicer time for any sort of riding, in fact) than in the late evening around sunset.

I got lucky with a camp-spot again - nothing all the way up, then just as the sun set the road flattened towards the top of the pass, and a perfect, hidden, flat and easy-to-reach camp-spot materialised.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Start: Sapa, VietnamEnd: Lai Chau, Vietnam - but not THE Lai Chau. There seem to be two Lai Chaus, and this is the one nearer Sapa, that is called something like Tam Duong on most mapsDistance: 75 kmTime: 4'41"Avg: 16.1 k/hMax: 49 k/hTotal: 4330 kmTotal riding days: 50Roadkill: a big, fat snakeRiding hours: 1330 - 1820

What a difference a freehub makes! Thank you Michael Zhao at Decathlon Shanghai for arranging that. I can now pedal and turn the wheel, which makes a big difference in terms of riding a bicycle.

I left Sapa rather late (it was starting to feel like home, had to tear myself away...), and got benighted, finishing the ride in the dark and pouring rain. In fact it rained, hard, almost all day. Luckily I had seen most of the view a week earlier, on my aborted exit from Sapa before the freehub finally kaputed.

It's 3pm. I have just descended 1000 metres down a beautiful valley. I am somewhere near Binh Lu.

The road flattens out; I may have to pedal.

Round go the pedals, but the wheels: no. The pedals spin very merrily but I come to a halt. Not a grinding halt, more a wobbly one.

So half #3 of the day is something that you can do for fun with a bike, but I don't recomment it. Push it, laden with 35 kg of stuff, back up a 1000 metre pass.

I get about 2/3rds of the way up when darkness catches up with me. Then, something works out for me, the way things do sometimes, when you're on a bike. Or not on a bike, in this case. The only possible camp-spot on the whole pass appears in the mist round the next bend.

Out comes the tent, and it's a happy night under canvas for me. The bike stays outside with the frogs.

Well, 98% of my freehub has come back from Hanoi. It is missing one of its pawls. Pawls are little sticky-outy bits. A freehub should have 3. Now mine has 2.

On a rainier day, this might make me quite upset.

But, as it is, (a) at least this way I get to find out what a pawl is; and (b) since the thing is broken anyway, I don't really suppose it matters too much.

My days of indolence and folded down lavatory paper have come to an end; I am now slumming it at the Quynh Anh Guesthouse down the steps from the Victoria. The price tag is about 1/40th of what it costs at the bright shiny place up the hill; but then, here I have to fold my own bogroll.Oh, the depths to which a man can sink.

I take the bike with the semi-repaired 98% of a freehub with its 2 remaining pawls and a third bodged pawl that a local engineer manages to fashion out of something he found down the back of the skirting board. Remarkably, the wheel goes round and things feel, if not quite perfect, then at least worth a shot.